This is my last post on this site. This was my first attempt at a blog and I’ve decided to start again from scratch. If you’re interested, you can find me at  www.holdempokernewbie.blogspot.co.nz      Seeya

   Playing poker is a bit like riding a roller-coaster: No matter how good a player you are, or how bad a player, you’re always going to get ups and downs. The difference between the winning and losing players is that the winners have more ups than downs. This may seem obvious but it’s an illustration of a basic principle of poker play: the key to winning is the ability to make correct decisions. The luck of the draw and the fall of the cards cannot be controlled and even pocket aces can be cracked, but if you consistently make correct decisions then you will be a winner in the long run.

   So much for the theory. Let’s take a look at some of my recent hands and see how they measure up in practice…

   1. HOOK, LINE AND SINKER.  Texas Holdem Sitngo. I’m on the button with A8 so I bet 3 times the blind. One player calls. The highest card on the flop is an 8. I have top pair with top kicker so I bet 3 times the blind again. The other player calls again. The turn is a 9; I bet half the pot and get called. Did he hit the 9?  Has he got an overpair? It’s an 8 on the river, giving me trips. The opposition bets big so I go all-in. He shows 99 for a full house.  I don’t see how I could have gotten away from this. Maybe the fearless bet on the river should have been a clue, but I figured he had something like A9 or TT. The fish took the bait.

   2.  CALLING A DESPERATE BLUFF. Early stages of a TH Multi-table Tournament. I’m in late position with Qs Td. A middle position player raises 4x, I call and the Big Blind calls. The flop is 6 3 K, two diamonds. It’s checked to me so I bet 3/4 of the pot. BB folds but Middle calls. The turn is  Qd, giving me top pair and a flush draw. Middle now puts in a big bet, more than the pot. I know he’s an aggressive player and I doubt he has a King, so I call. The river is Jd, giving me a Queen-high flush. Middle goes all-in. His stack is much bigger than mine, so this is my tournament life. Was he betting on a flush draw too and if so, is it better than Queen-high? I call and he shows 7 2 of hearts! He has nothing. Would have been an awesome bluff if it had come off.

   3. POCKET BATTLE. Fixed Limit TH.  I’m in the big blind withTT. Player 1 raises, I reraise , P1 caps the betting and I call, along with two others. Four of us see the flop: K 6 2. I bet, P1 raises and I call, as do the other two. No-one is scared of the King. The turn is a 3 and everyone checks. The river is another King and the Small Blind bets. I think I have the best hand but just in case, I just call. The other two also call.  They show 77, 88, 99! LOL. Decision-making is so much harder in fixed limit games because it’s harder to push players out of the pot.

   4. TOP PAIR ON A SCARY BOARD. Fixed Limit TH. I’m in late position with Kd Qd. I raise, SB reraises, I call, as does the Button. The flop is T 6 Q, all hearts, giving me top pair. I get in a raising battle with SB and we cap the betting, forcing the Button to fold. The turn is 9h, putting four hearts on the board. SB checks so I bet, hoping that he’s missed the flush, but he calls. The river is 5d and we both check. SB shows QQ for trips. I had to bet on the turn in the hope that he’d be scared off by that flush draw. Maybe if I’d bet again on the river he would have folded. Guess I’ll never know.

   5. A RISKY FIXED LIMIT BLUFF. Fixed Limit TH. I’m on the button with J8. Four other players also limp into the pot. The flop is K 9 Q, giving me nothing but an inside straight draw. Everyone checks so I bet, narrowing it to two callers. The turn is a 6, giving me more nothing. They check, I bet, and they both call. Uh oh!  The river is a 5: blank. They both check so I bet again, praying for them to fold. They both fold. This is a risky play in Fixed Limit games. I think I’ll leave this sort of thing for No Limit games in future.

   What I need to do more of is to review my hands and look for what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong. I should be always asking the question, “Am I making correct decisions?” Gotta keep climbing that learning curve.

   I stopped making new year’s resolutions years ago but for the last couple of years I’ve been setting myself a few Poker-related goals. It’s March already and summer is mostly over (although it never really got going at all this year) and it’s time to get serious. So here are my goals for 2012, in no particular order.

   1. STAY IN THE BLACK. I’ve been keeping records of my games for about three years now and have kept a separate Poker bankroll for about two. Most of the time I’ve been living with a net loss. It wasn’t until September 2010 that I finally got out of the red and into the black. Since then there have been some major fluctuations but I’ve stayed in positive territory. The primary goal is to stay there.

   2. PLAY TEXAS HOLDEM FIXED LIMIT.  I want to learn a new Poker variation every year. Last year it was Pot Limit Omaha. That exercise didn’t go well so I’ve decided to go with something a little less challenging this time. I’ve done reasonably well playing limit versions of live Texas Holdem in the past so I’m aiming to play this game about half of the time in 2012. It’ll be mostly online but I’m hoping to get a live game going as well (see no. 3 below).

   3. START A HOME GAME.  I’d like to get a fixed limit Poker game going if I can find the players. The trouble is, pretty much all the Poker players I know are No Limit Tournament players. I actually got a game going last year but it ended up being a one-off. I won a fair bit of money on that day, so maybe I scared them off…  It would be nice and simple: once a month, low buy-in, dealer’s choice. Any starters?

   4. READ DOYLE BRUNSON’S SUPER SYSTEM. This is, apparently, the Poker players’ bible. I’ve read a few Poker books. Some were helpful and some were not. But everybody seems to be referencing Super System so I guess I’d better go back to the source and see what all the fuss is about. I might even go as far as reading Super System 2 while I’m at it.

   5. FIND AND PLAY LIVE GAMES. Up until the end of last year my wife and I were playing in a regular Friday night Holdem Cash Tournament at a local pub, but they’re not playing that anymore. I like playing both online and live so the challenge is to find live games that are affordable, ie within my maximum buy-in limits. I know that another local pub is restarting its Wednesday night cash tournament so I might start there, even if I have to stretch my maximum buy-in level a little.

   6. DOUBLE MY BANKROLL. This is a big ask, as they say in the sports pages. By my calculations, it means increasing my bankroll by about 6% per month. This doesn’t sound so difficult until you realise that I’m only ever playing with a small fraction of my bankroll at any one time. At the moment  I’m going backwards and I now have less than what I started the year with. Even so, its something to aim for.

   7. LEARN THE ODDS. I know that the chances of filling up a flush draw with two cards to come are about 2 to 1 against and with one card to come, 4 to 1 against. I know that the odds of hitting trips on the flop with a pocket pair are about 8 to 1 against. I know a few other stats like this but I need to know more. This is just a matter of getting the right book or going to the right website and studying. It just takes a little time and commitment on my part. Got to fit it in somewhere.

   So there it is. Now that my goals are down in black and white I guess I’ll just have to make an effort to tick them off one by one. But really, number one is absolutely vital. Like the song says, “once you go Black you never go back”. Fingers crossed.

   Ok, it’s not strictly true to say I’m new to the game of poker. After all I’ve been playing the game off and on (mostly off) for the past thirty years. But I’ve only been playing the game that everyone’s playing nowadays  -tournament Texas Holdem- for about four years, and I’ve only been playing online for about a year. A lot has changed since my father taught me how to play poker using matchsticks for money on the kitchen table.

   Of course, in those days there was only one game: Five-Card Draw. I don’t remember when I played my first game for real money but I played only rarely until I met my wife-to-be, Pauline. She used to play Poker for small change every morning with her workmates. The game they played was Nine-Card: five cards in the hand and four on the board, turned over one at a time.

   It was not long before we got involved in some “syndicate games” with some friends and relatives. These were Saturday night/Sunday morning games played about once a month, where every player would have a turn at “hosting”. The host would collect a nice fat rake from each hand, making it hard for anyone else to make any money. Nevertheless, these games were usually alcohol-fuelled and a good time was had by all. I was introduced to a range of new variations on Nine-Card, all involving multiple groups of community cards and lots of action. But eventually we gave up on these games and Poker dropped into the background for me for many years.

   Then, about seven years ago, a friend said he wanted to start up a home Poker game, so we did; we rounded up a few keen members of our Pool Club (my wife included) and played occasional games on a Saturday night, after our regular pool games. This was dealers choice -Five-Card Draw, Nine-Card and Seven-Card- with a buy-in of about $50. Sometime during this period they started showing a new “sport” on ESPN: tournament Texas Holdem. This introduced two new concepts to me: tournament Poker and the game of Texas Holdem. It seemed like an interesting version of the game, so Texas Holdem soon became part of our home game.

   Then came the Poker boom. Tournament Poker was the NEXT BIG THING in the pubs. All the Quiz nites and Karaoke comps were out the door and everyone was playing Texas Holdem tournaments for bar tab prizes. I tried my hand at a few of these but never really got the hang of it, so I thought I’d better read up on the subject. This was a huge revelation to me. I never knew there were so many books on the subject. I read a couple and began to realise thet there was some serious strategy involved with playing Poker. I guess that’s what really got me hooked.

   Armed with my new-found knowledge and starting-hands list I marched off to the casino to check out the Poker action. For a couple of years I’d play a few games of no limit Texas Holdem at the casino over the Christmas period. I won a few but  mostly I lost. It took me a while to realise that playing for funny money at the pub was very different to playing no limit for real money. Eventually I wised up and decided to play in games that I could afford.

   By this time my home game had collapsed due to lack of interest, but new opportunities were opening up. My wife was playing in a monthly Pool tournament and some of the players started playing Poker tournaments for cash. For $5 to $10 you got up to a couple of hours of Poker action and the chance to win cash. I got into these tourneys on a regular basis and when they started playing every Friday night at a local pub Pauline and I became regulars at those games too. Then I discovered that some other pubs were playing cash games for $10 to $20 entry, usually on a Wednesday night. All of a sudden I had plenty of opportunities to play in regular, reasonably cheap Poker games. Poker was becoming my number one leisure-time activity. Then, something happened to put my Poker playing activities on a whole new level.

   In early 2011 I finally joined the 21st century and got a computer. One of the first things I did after connecting to the internet was to download an online Poker program. Now I can play anytime of the day or night. I can play in tournaments, ring games, sitngo’s, six-handed, ten-handed, heads-up, you name it. What’s more, I can play for just a couple of dollars if I want, or higher, depending on my inclination and my bankroll. I still play in live games when I can find them, but now I always have the option to play whenever I want.

   I’ve come a long way from matchsticks on the kitchen table. But the journey’s really just beginning. It could be a wild ride…